As we’ve grown over recent months the demand for services we offer has grown too. Quality and reasonable, honest pricing is something that we have always been committed to, so it should come as no surprise that the changes to our services and pricing structure has taken a good 5 months to develop.

Our approach to our new services is this: offer more premium services, whilst continuing to keep our prices reasonable. Essentially, offer more services for those who are wanting to push their work in new directions

For this reason we have decided to offer not one but TWO scanning resolutions. In addition to the big scan size we already had available, we now offer a bigger one! This larger resolution is being introduced so we can better cater to people printing for exhibitons, large published works and the like. It’s essentially a scan size up from what we were offering, and will be at a slightly higher price-point due to the time it takes to render these beasty things! When you choose to scan with us you now have the option to get Big or Bigger scans, giving you more freedom to pick and choose what suits your needs. Both scanning sizes are at the top end of what our Fuji Frontier is capable of, because we always want to offer the best. You can find out better descriptions of these on our site right now so you know what works for you.

In addition to this change in scanning, we have also introduced a change to our black and white processing fee, and being completely transparent here, this was probably what we were most nervous/worried to do. As you may well have guessed (our name gives it away) we started this lab from a need we saw; New Zealand needed a realistically priced black and white processing service. We were unhappy with the unreasonable prices we saw quoted by the very limited amount of people that processed black and white film. After charging the same Dev/Scan for both C-41 and B&W for so long, now a year down the track, we have had to revisit this price to make it more realistic for the love and time put into ensuring your black and white comes out the best it can. Processing black and white is very different to processing colour. Where processing C-41 means putting your film into our trusty Noritsu and allowing it to work its magic, black and white is a much more manual process in pretty much every aspect of turning it into a digital file. Our black and white is processed through a rotary processor. To begin this process your film must be loaded onto a reel in a dark bag, which gets loaded into the rotary processor, completing a 4 bath process until it is developed. Next up; drying. Whilst colour film comes out dry from our Noritsu, black and white comes out of the processor wet, meaning we must wait for this to fully dry before we can get it into the scanner. And after we scan this film we need to manually spot it for dust, because digital ICE (dust removal technology) does not work on black and white film. As you can see, this process is significantly more dedicated and therefore takes a lot more time and attention. To be able to keep doing what we do, we have to make the tough decision to bump up the price of this just a bit. Please know, we did not make this decision lightly, and we are only doing this so we can realistically continue to deliver a high quality service and actually keep the rest of our prices down like we have always been dedicated to doing.

To accompany these new changes we’re introducing a brand spankin’ new order form AKA job sheet! This baby offers you more choice and allows you to be more specific about your film than ever before. We wanted you to give you the option to have more say in how your images look, and present all the information you need to get the most out of the processing experience. This order form may look a little more confusing but we’ve got you covered with an Order Form Manual, live on our site and at every drop-off point for your reference. This should (from the extensive revision and testing we did of this thing) give you the full run down on how to fill it all out!

Speaking of drop-off points (sorry bout these segues by the way)… we have two new drop-off points! They are still getting set up and we’ll officially announce them when they’re opened for drop-offs, but one is at Checks Downtown, a damn cool street-wear brand in Auckland CBD, and the other is at Snapshot, in Hamilton! We are so grateful to be expanding to a few new locations, and extra excited to be heading on the road down to the mighty Waikato. As we mentioned, more to come on that ASAP.

Other than those few updates you might also notice the obvious, our new website! We decided it was time to update this and make it a lot more user friendly, explanatory and all round helpful for oyou. Not to mention, we needed this fresh site to host our new film store! Finally, you can buy your film from us and do it online, which is so bloody exciting (for us and hopefully you) and has been a dream for a long while now. This means that no matter where you may find yourself in lil ol’ New Zealand you can order film from us and get it delivered, right across the country, and its super easy to do so (did someone say same day / overnight delivery?).

And not to mention, this site also allows us to offer our photo printing in a far more accessible and convenient way, allowing you to upload your files straight to our site from literally anywhere for us to print and have ready for pick up, or to send back to you. So easy and so fun. Files are one thing, but prints, those are pretty awesome to see!

So to recap (because this is a damn long post)

We have updated our price list

We are offering new scanning options

We have a new order form

We have a new website

We are selling film online / in store

We have two new drop-off points (more about that soon because this post is way too long)

We’re doing printing

And more importantly…

You can still get the same quality, $20 dev and scans you’re are used to

Thank you for reading through this post, we know it’s a whole clusterfluff of info to take in and we appreciate any thoughts or feedback sent our way. We hope you can understand the changes we have made to our service, and hope you know we’ve always got you wonderful people at the forefront of our minds when making these decisions. We wouldn’t be around without you, and hope you know that! We’re a little lab, but we always want to do our best for you.